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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.

Alain de Botton

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Alain de Botton
Age: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Animals
Beings
Capable
Emotion
Notorious
Animal
Inability
Makes
Suicide
Human
Emotions
Humans
Express

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The degree of sympathy we feel regarding another's fiasco is directly proportional to how easy or difficult it is for us to imagine ourselves, under like circumstances, making a similar mistake.
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I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
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What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.
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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
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The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven't been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
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When you look at the Moon, you think, ‘I’m really small. What are my problems?’ It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.
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Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, Don't you worry about being called names? retorted, Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?
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Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them respect, for humiliating them.
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The longing for a destiny is no nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. All too often forced to share our bed with those who cannot fathom our soul, can we not be forgiven if we believe ourselves fated to stumble one day upon the man or woman of our dreams.
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Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.
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One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
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We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.
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The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.
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...if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
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